Thursday, November 13, 2008

Lawyers and Economists

This post from the Economist's Free Exchange Blog is excellent. They quote a very cross Willem Buiter

Except for a depressingly small minority among them, lawyers know nothing. They are incapable of logic. They don't know the difference between necessary and sufficient conditions or between type I and type II errors. Indeed, any concept of probability is alien to them. They don't understand the concepts of opportunity cost and trade off. They cannot distinguish between normative and positive statements. They are so focused on winning an argument through technicalities, that they no longer would recognise the truth if it bit them in the butt. If you are very lucky, a lawyer will give you nothing but the truth. You will never get the truth, let alone the whole truth. Things have degenerated to the point that lawyers and the legal profession not only routinely undermine justice, but even the law.

we had found that it was possible to make intellectual and policy progress in discussions with economists because we had all been trained to think analytically: to break the issue down into background assumptions about the world, beliefs about the principal causal mechanisms, and claims about the likely effects of different policies on those chains of cause-and-effect. When we disagreed--as we often did--we could quickly ascertain where and why, and then agree on how to go hunting for pieces of information that would help resolve the disagreement. This was in striking contrast with our collective experience with lawyers or media types, who would be vague about cause and effect, or shift premises in the middle of a meeting when they saw that making different background claims about the world would provide a smoother road to their desired conclusion.